Career Paths for ehealth, Digital Health, Health Informatics Professionals

If you’re a student or an emerging professional, you may be wondering what different career paths there are for the ehealth, digital health, or health informatics profession (all of these are equivalent by the way – for simplicity, I will use the term ehealth). After all, this isn’t a popular topic for discussion in any undergraduate studies. I know I have been in the same position, and materials online just aren’t very clear.

Now that I’m several years into the ehealth profession, I have seen first hand what the career opportunities are. I have also spoken with many of my colleagues (graduates of McMaster’s MSc ehealth) about their ehealth career. In this blog, I will share my findings with you and hope it will help you with your own career choices.

To start off, let’s first understand a bit about ehealth:

ehealth is the use of information technology for the delivery of care or support of wellbeing.

I have a more in-depth explanation of this definition in this blog article.

Generally speaking, ehealth is a very broad field, covering any activities that goes into producing and maintaining technologies used by patients such as patient information portals, mobile health apps – or by care providers such as electronic health records or precision medicine technologies – or by a combination of patients/providers such as telemedicine technologies. Health system executives also rely on ehealth for decision making – the tools and technologies they use and the activities supporting health information analytics are also examples of ehealth.

ehealth professionals work in a variety of settings – they can be in the clinical setting working on the implementation of a new software for clinical use, in an office (or from home) if they’re crunching health data to generate analytics for health system resource planning, or even on the road if they’re working in a mobile health clinic. They can work in organizations of all sizes, from small startups working on the next-generation fitness technology, to hospitals who need to ensure the right patient lab results is accessible by the right care team at the right time and at the right place, to larger organizations such as the space agency who is developing remote surgical techniques for astronauts.

By reflecting on my colleagues' careers and combined with resources from Digital Health Canada, I have summarized 8 career paths you can pursue in ehealth in the table below - with few job titles for each career pathway.

Please note the job lists in the table is far from exhaustive. Taking on one path also does not preclude you from choosing another path later on in your career. ehealth teams are diverse and always multidisciplinary. Team members often are multitalented and wear multiple hats.

If you see a role that suits you, go on to try it out - apply to it for a summer or take on an ehealth graduate degree with internship opportunity. If you are passionate about improving human health and quality of life using technology, this is the right field to be in. Importantly, you will enjoy a highly rewarding career.

Follow the links below to read more detailed descriptions of each ehealth / digital health career pathway. Each page will contain a Path Description, Preferred Background, Relevant Certifications, General Job Responsibilities, Career Progression and Salary Expectations, as well as Sample Interview Questions:

• Clinical and Health Services
• Health Delivery Process (⭐Members Content)
• Project Management (⭐Members Content)
• Product Management (⭐Members Content)
• Organization and Behavioral Management (⭐Members Content)
• Analysis and Evaluation (⭐Members Content)
• Information Management (⭐Members Content)
• Information Technology (⭐Members Content)